Slavery Still Exists: Human Trafficking

Our most popular guest post thus far here on the g92.org blog has been Sarah Eisele-Dyrli’s post on “The Connection Between Faith, Human Trafficking, and Immigration” a few weeks ago.
We’re very glad that, in recent years, the Church in the United States has begun to recognize the tragic reality that modern-day slavery exists in the form of human trafficking. As Sarah noted in this space a few weeks ago, this terrible phenomenon persists within the United States at least in part because of a broken immigration system. After all, the victim of human trafficking who elicits our collective compassion is often scorned as an “illegal alien” until she or he is identified and granted a “T” visa as a trafficking victim—which should cause us to wonder how many of the undocumented immigrants in our society might also be still-unidentified victims of trafficking and thus trapped in slave-like conditions.
My World Relief colleague Danielle Mitchell, who works in North Carolina and serves as one of the experts within World Relief’s anti-human trafficking programs, does an excellent job of explaining the issue of human trafficking. This video of her presentation at The Justice Conference in Oregon last month provides an excellent overview of the issue, including some suggestions for how you might respond.